


Autonomous

by Bright_Elen



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars (Marvel Comics), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Antagonistic co-workers with benefits, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Hand & Finger Kink, Robot Sex, Treasure Hunting, Vibrators, Wire Play, mild spoilers for seasons 2 and 3 of Star Wars Rebels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 09:02:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14398746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: Sexy robo-femslash archaeology adventures IN SPACE





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clawsou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clawsou/gifts).



> I'm a little nervous about writing L3-37 when I've only read Wookieepedia and seen the trailers; I guess in 4 weeks we'll see how I did/how well the marketing has represented her. I'm just so excited about her and I had a good reason to publish a pre-release fic: Happy Birthday, Clawsou!!!
> 
> Thanks to the wonderful [SassySnowperson](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DramaticEntrance/pseuds/SassySnowperson) fot the beta.
> 
> Content warnings in end notes. Enjoy!

Aphra had never liked Lothal. The towns? Small and boring. The fields slash open plains? Vast and boring. The Jedi temples were probably chock-full of juicy archaeological finds, but since they were impenetrable by non-Force users, that was just adding insult to injury. It was only the possibility of a job that had gotten her into a chair in a shit cantina on this shit planet in the first place.

“A few millennia ago, Lothal’s Queen Taghavi got religion. She got it real bad, see, and decided to take a pilgrimage to a place of ancient wisdom,” said the Devaronian guy — Vizago, she thought his name was — trying to hire Aphra. “Brought all kinds of offerings, including some wintrium.”

Aphra’s eyes widened. “Wintrium? Here?”

Vizago smirked. “Before the pilgrimage she’d established a trade network across half the galaxy. She let it go after she converted, but she brought quite a lot of nice things on her pilgrimage to Atollon.”

Aphra frowned. “Atollon?” She scoffed. “There’s never been any substantiated evidence of any kind of sentient activity on Atollon.”

“Not substantiated, no,” Vizago repeated. Shrugged. “Everyone on Lothal knows stories about the pilgrims who went to Atollon seeking wisdom. Only some of them came back. Those who did told wild stories. The latest one, old Kavra, saw a chest with the royal crest of Lothal on it.”

“So why didn’t they take it themselves?”

“Too pious,” Vizago said.

“Still doesn’t explain why you need an archaeologist.”

“The pilgrims set up shrines along the route. They had instructions on how to get to the next shrine, and the next, all the way to the place of offering. But they were more artistic than clear, and we’ve lost the art of reading them. Kavra was the last who made it, and he’s too old to remember any more.”

Searching Vizago’s face to try to find the lie, Aphra considered. There were probably hazards he wasn’t telling her about. Probably best to bring backup. “Okay. I want the wintrium and fifteen percent of everything else.”

Vizago spread his mouth wide. It wasn’t a smile. “The wintrium is mine. I can get nice things anywhere.”

Aphra shrugged. “So can I. Do you think you can find one cave on a planet without me?”

His eyes narrowed. “Well, rumor has it there’s two pieces. You can have the smaller one.”

Taking a long drink from her cup and covering a grimace (what kind of sithspit were they serving in this place?), Aphra kept eye contact. “The bigger piece and ten percent.”

Vizago’s eyes narrowed. “Twelve percent and the smaller.”

Well, it was a slow month, anyway. “Deal,” Aphra said, holding out a gloved hand.

“Good,” he said, taking her hand hard enough to let her know he could crush it. “My crew will meet you at these coordinates in forty-four hours.”

Pocketing the datachip, Aphra stood, gave her new employer a grin and a jaunty wave, and cleared out.

* * *

Vizago’s crew turned out to be a human smuggler, his hodgepodge droid, and a Yuzzem mercenary.

“As we previously discussed,” Aphra said under her breath to Triple-Zero, “No murder or torture on this job.” She paused, looking the Yuzzem up and down. “Well, you can if they try to hurt one of us first.”

“My existence is a continual disappointment,” the droid sighed.

“You’re the archaeologist?” the smuggler said, what was probably supposed to be a charming smile on his face. “I’m Lando and very pleased to meet you.”

“Doctor Aphra,” Aphra said. Her coolness didn’t seem to disturb Lando’s poise. “You’re awfully well-dressed for a smuggler.”

He smiled. “If I can’t do it in style, what’s the point?”

Aphra gave him an incredulous look. “Credits?”

Lando chuckled. “That too. This is my navigator, Elthree, and the bodyguard is Dek.”

Aphra nodded and gestured to 0-0-0. “This is Triple-Zero. Don’t do anything even remotely threatening or he’ll use it as an excuse to do bad, bad things to you.”

“You had to warn them,” 0-0-0 moaned. “Why did you bring me at all if you’re not going to let me use my talents?”

“You said you needed to get out of the ship before your circuits melted out of boredom and almost shocked Beetee when I suggested bringing him instead,” Aphra reminded him.

0-0-0 sighed. “I suppose I did.” It had been a really slow month.

L3, sensor light scanning back and forth, said something to 0-0-0 in — what was that, Ithorian? No language Aphra understood.

And 0-0-0, with a tone of vaguely pleasant surprise, answered in the same language.

“What was that about?” Aphra hissed under her breath.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with, Master Aphra,” 0-0-0 replied. “Just chatter between droids.”

Aphra highly doubted that, but it was easier to pretend he was telling the truth, so she just nodded and boarded the freighter alongside the others. It probably wasn’t important, anyway.

* * *

It was a short jump to Atollon, but there was still plenty of waiting, because they didn’t even have starting coordinates. Lando put them into a slow orbit and L3 set the ships scanners to look for a convergence of landscape features mentioned by ‘Old Kavra’ over the years.

Aphra studied the other smugglers to pass the time. Dek was easy; he was muscle who owed Vizago a favor. Lando was a bit odd, a smuggler who seemed too elegant for his job; but it was the droid she wound up thinking about the most. She could identify most of the parts she was made of, but some of them were a mystery.

“Are you going to shoot me or ask me to dinner?” L3 said, startling Aphra a little.

“Just wondering,” Aphra said, trying not to show her embarrassment at being caught staring. “Did you start as an astromech or a protocol? I’m guessing protocol, or at least something with arms and legs.”

“It’s rude to ask about people’s physical conditions, you know,” Lando said.

“And I’m pretty sure your legs were originally designed for something other than bipedal movement,” Aphra said, ignoring him. “You don’t even really have feet.”

L3 didn’t bother to look at Aphra. “And you don’t really have social skills of any kind, yet you’ve survived this long.”

“It’s my razor wit and knack for knowing when to run,” Aphra said, undeterred. “So, which parts of you came first? And why did the Baron over here decide to mix and match?”

Lando and L3 shared a look. Aphra wondered if they were about to do something that would make 0-0-0 happy. That would make the job more difficult, but it might also mean she’d get a bigger cut and possibly even the ship, if she played her cards right.

“Elthree modified herself,” Lando said. “And if you keep being rude, she might modify you, too. I’m pretty sure she’s faster than Triple-Zero.”

“Would you like to test that theory? Do please say yes,” 0-0-0 said.

“ _No_ , Triple-Zero,” Aphra warned.

L3 said something else to the murder droid in Ithorian. It sounded...dismissive, maybe? Aphra didn’t know enough about the language to be able to tell. She _could_ tell that it was time to deescalate the situation. It was too early in the job to worry about getting shot by her colleagues.

“Right, we’ll just kick back until you need us,” Aphra said, and dragged 0-0-0 out of the cockpit. He didn’t go without getting a last word in, one that Aphra didn’t need to understand in order to know it was a curse.

Sprawling on the couch, she idly traced her tattoo, trying to focus on something that wasn’t the itch of curiosity, irritating and irritatingly augmented by the lack of answers, in the back of her mind.

“Who cares, anyway,” Aphra muttered to herself. It didn’t matter, right? Which parts L3 had sought out and why. Which ones she’d decided to keep. Which ones she’d just happened upon and decided to add on a whim.

“Your denial is vague and unconvincing,” 0-0-0 said.

“Shut up.”

* * *

The treasure-hunting party found six sites on the planet that had the correct combination of landforms, latitude, and a water source. Aphra’s job started when they landed.

“If they were mostly human pilgrims,” Aphra said to herself, surveying the landscape, “the starting point for the journey would most likely be within a ten minute walk of the spring.” She scanned the horizon. “Given the terrain, that means probably no more than a quarter klick radius.”

They searched that area, and found nothing. Aphra was undeterred, as they still had five more sites to examine.

By the time they got to the fifth site, her optimism was starting to flag. Vizago had been convinced there was a base camp of sorts for the pilgrims, or at least that there had been, decades ago, and without sentient life it was unlikely that scavenger animals would be able to completely erase the signs of inhabitation.

“Nothing here either, Master Aphra?” 0-0-0 said behind her, startling her a little. She was starting to get tempted to leave him behind at the next opportunity, bodyguard or not.

“Haven’t checked out that last coral tree. Come on,” she said, not waiting for 0-0-0’s mincing steps. She outpaced him quickly and ignored his predictions of her certain death without his help.

To Aphra’s very pleased surprise, under the shade of the coral she found some carbon blowback from a camp stove, three empty energy cells, and a rather nice vibroblade that had somehow gotten left behind. Aphra admired it and had just started to slide it into her jacket when she heard a faint mechanical whirring behind her. Before she could react, a metal hand closed tightly around her wrist, hauled her around, and pulled her up onto her toes.

It turned out that L3 was really tall. Aphra found herself having the ridiculous thought that she’d have been getting a facefull of a rather nice rack if L3 were human.

“Loot gets divvied up at the end of the mission, remember?” L3 said. Her voice didn’t seem off baseline at all.

Nothing about her was off baseline. Aphra tried to twist and tug her way out of the droid’s grip, but no amount of struggling loosened a hold that seemed to cost L3 no effort. It sent an electric thrill of what was absolutely, definitely, _completely_ a fight-or-flight response up Aphra’s spine.

Yeah. Survival.

“Of course,” Aphra said weakly. “Was just putting it away until we got back to the ship.”

The light of L3’s sensor scanned back and forth several times, and then she let go of Aphra all at once right before 0-0-0 trotted into view. Shoving her hands into her pockets to avoid rubbing her wrist, Aphra was only too happy to pretend nothing had happened.

L3 shared yet another look with Lando, but she didn’t acknowledge the past five minutes, either.

Relaxing somewhat, Aphra began to explain the pilgrim site.

* * *

“Spiders. Why did it have to be kriffing spiders?” Aphra complained as she dove out of reach of far too many spindly legs.

«Would you prefer rathtars?» Dek said, laying down cover fire as they ran through the caves Aphra had thought might have once been a pilgrim shelter.

“I’d prefer,” Aphra said, trading her hot blaster for her backup and taking aim, “if they’d have the decency to die when you kriffing shoot them!”

Aphra’s shot hit the lead spider in the eye. It collapsed, dead. “Oh.”

Dek snorted. He tried to shoot another spider in the eye but they were moving too fast. «Better run.»

Aphra didn’t need to be told twice. She ran, jumping over the holes in the tunnels that might have been other tunnels or might have been places where the spiders laid their eggs or, maybe, were just holes. She occasionally heard Dek shooting, but didn’t look back to check on his progress.

The next bend she rounded had her squinting through daylight pouring into the mouth of the cave. Relieved, Aphra sprinted the last part, grinning as she emerged into the light, and saw…

The rest of the party fighting off more spiders. Fan-kriffing-tastic.

“Aim for the eyes!” Aphra shouted, wondering if she could make it to the ship before the spiders did, and how much the others would hate her if she locked them out.

Probably a lot. So, on to Plan B. Now she just had to come up with Plan B.

Lando and L3 were standing back-to-back, shooting spiders as fast as they could, and even killing them now that they knew where to hit. 0-0-0 was nowhere to be seen, and Aphra wondered if he was on the ship or lying in pieces in a cave somewhere. She decided that Phase 1 of Plan B was getting her back against something. She started moving towards a handy rock formation, shooting as she went.

“We’ll need to kill these before we try to get back to the ship!” Lando yelled to the general vicinity, but probably mostly to Aphra. “I don’t want these things getting inside the Falcon!”

“That’s a lot of spiders!” Aphra pointed out. Dek came trotting out of the cave, grinning. It was a little soothing to watch the smile slide off of his face like it must have off of hers.

“There would be fewer if you’d kill some yourself!” L3 growled.

“I’m trying!”

The next while was spent shooting, running, shooting, dodging, and shooting some more. It was touch and go — Lando and L3, who’d been at it longer, eventually had to take turns with their blasters to account for weapon cooldown — but every time they switched there were fewer and fewer living spiders. Eventually, there were none.

“Let’s do that again never,” Aphra said, already trotting towards the ship. Both of her blasters were almost too hot to use.

Lando, closer to it than she was, moved at a brisk swagger. “Agreed. We’ll need to figure out a way to check caves for —”

A spider jumped down from the Falcon, narrowly missing Lando. Aphra brought a blaster up, but L3 didn’t even bother with a ranged weapon. She just grabbed the spider’s foreleg, right below the first joint, and wrenched the last segment clean off. The spider only had a moment to scream before L3 drove the thing’s own leg into its eye, killing it before it could even try to damage the droid. It was kind of disgusting, impressively brutal, and, unfortunately, really hot. Aphra’s body was already increasing her neural impulses and bloodflow and the production of some other bodily fluids.

Shit, she was staring.

One day, she thought. One day she might not be an absolute fool for dangerous women.

Well. For a given definition of ‘women.’

 _So scratch ‘I’m not into droids’ and replace with ‘most droids aren’t my type’._ Probably because most were designed by men, whereas L3 had designed herself and _oh, kriff, that’s even sexier._

Fortunately, the last spider really was the last, and they were able to enter the ship with no problem.

L3, standing on the ramp as the others climbed it, gave Aphra an unreadable look as she boarded. Aphra did her best to act casual, but when she passed within arm’s reach of the droid, she felt an electric tingling all across her skin.

That was probably psychosomatic. That she was aware of it only helped so much.

Well. If she couldn’t keep her head, she might as well shoot for the jackpot. Now she just had to figure out what would impress L3.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arg, I can't believe I forgot to thank [SassySnowperson](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DramaticEntrance/pseuds/SassySnowperson) for cheerleading and her help with word-wrangling!

Good news: the next shrine on the pilgrimage route was above ground and far away from any caves.

Bad news: Atollon was a desert planet. Which meant that while it had very little precipitation, what it did have tended to get squeezed into a week or so of monsoons. That, somehow, Vizago had neglected to mention and that hadn’t shown up on any of Aphra’s research.

So they got to spend four days cooped up together in the Falcon, smelling increasingly of wet fur and socks. By the end of the first day, Aphra had shut 0-0-0 off at his own request and was seriously considering sitting in the downpour just for variety. Dek told stories about particularly entertaining/bloody jobs of his, and Lando shared tales of his exploits that Aphra estimated to be about three quarters fabrications.

Lando finished. Aphra let the quiet sit for a moment.

“Wanna hear about the time I temporarily resurrected an ancient civilization?” she said, shooting a playful look at L3.

“No,” the droid said.

Aphra tried not to visibly wilt.

“So,” Lando said, voice as smooth as ever. “Who’s up for sabacc?”

* * *

Another day of caves, another dozen spiders trying to kill them.

Aphra, tired of her blasters overheating, decided to try one of the grenades she’d whipped up during the rain.

“Everyone!” She yelled, though she was facing towards L3, “Check this out!”

Setting a short countdown time, she rolled the grenade under a cluster of spiders. The explosion left her ears ringing, but hey, at least there was now only a smear of fluid and carbon scoring where before there had been…

Kriff. One spider. The other spiders were looking a little singed, but after they had a few seconds to shake themselves, went right back to attacking the bipeds.

Right before she raised her blaster, L3 gave a slight shake of her head and a bounce of her sensor light that combined translated, Aphra was pretty sure, to an eye roll.

* * *

Getting ready to close up the ship for the night, Aphra idly watched L3 setting the controls to polarize the hull automatically if anything tripped the ship’s external motion sensors.

“You lust after the most inappropriate individuals,” 0-0-0 complained suddenly, making her jump. “I wish I were surprised.”

“Shut up, Triple-Zero,” Aphra grumbled, looking back at her own nighttime ritual of sorting through the day's holo data.

“And the way you’re making a fool of yourself trying to impress her,” 0-0-0 continued. “As if a superior intelligence could be impressed by your sack of flesh.”

She wasn’t about to tell him that she was insecure about exactly that. “She was totally checking me out earlier,” she insisted, though she was sure of no such thing. “Are you jealous?”

0-0-0 reared back, more affronted than she’d ever seen him, which was mildly satisfying. “Jealous? Of course not. That implies there’s something to be jealous about, which there isn’t, because she isn’t the slightest bit interested in you. I can’t believe you’d even suggest such a thing. The nerve.”

As he tottered off in a huff, Aphra allowed herself a small smile.

* * *

Nearly two weeks after they’d started, Lando and L3 were surveying the area of what should have been the pilgrimage site, 0-0-0 doing his own listless scan. Aphra stood a little ways back from it all, frowning, trying to figure out what she’d missed. All the signs pointed to this spot: the trajectory of the pilgrimage route, the descriptions of a amphitheatre-like valley ringed by spider caves, the water source nearby. She supposed there could be another place like it, but something in her gut told her this was it.

It was possible that the pilgrims had left the offerings in the caves. Given the lack of anything artificial in the first cave (and, okay, she hadn’t been paying too close attention to the scenery on her way out), the spiders almost certainly hadn’t dragged the offerings underground. Even if they had, usually animal-scavenging left _some_ signs.

And there were none. If Vizago was correct about the queen’s loot, not nearly enough time had passed to erase them completely. So Aphra was sure that they were missing something.

Something about, maybe, that big coral tree in the middle of the valley. Something about it was strange.

As she glanced back and forth between it and the trees at the edges of the valley, she huffed in frustration. For the past few days — that were starting to feel like weeks — there’d been little else to look at besides expanses of rock and coral trees. She should have been able to draw large chunks of the landscape from memory at this point.

Maybe that would help, actually. Aphra got out a datapad and stylus and started sketching.

The corals grew like kachoufa plants, she realized, the plates growing in a spiral around a central stalk. They were pretty, actually, and she was pretty sure there was an ancient Devaronian culture that had made architecture in a similar aesthetic, using radial symmetry to create a more botanical feel than most artificial structures.

Head snapping up, Aphra turned back to look at the central tree again.

“Kriff me,” she sighed. It was so obvious once she knew what she was looking at.

Of course, she noticed this just as L3 approached it.

“Stay back!” Aphra called. Maybe there was nothing dangerous about that tree, but Aphra’s finely-honed self-preservation instincts were telling her to stay the hell away from the only coral on the planet with bilateral symmetry.

L3 either didn’t hear her or didn’t care. Aphra hesitated, then cursed herself again for a fool and scrambled forward, grabbing L3’s arm and pulling her backwards.

“Stay back!” she repeated. “That one’s different.”

L3 regarded her with what Aphra interpreted as exasperation. “I can see that. That difference makes it the best place to look.”

“Yeah, but we should look carefully,” Aphra insisted. “Someone took or moved the offerings — it wasn’t animals. They could have booby-trapped the tree before they disappeared, or maybe they have ancestors living in there waiting to defend it. Something’s off.”

L3 shifted, the light in her dome scanning back and forth before she looked back at the tree. To Aphra’s relief she took a step back.

“I don’t see what all your fuss is about,” 0-0-0 said, tottering in from the side where Aphra hadn’t noticed him, moving towards the center of the valley. “It’s fourteen percent more likely that the difference in symmetry is just what made the pilgrims think it was a special place. Organics are always getting superstitious notions like that.”

“I said stay back, Triple Zero!” Aphra shouted, and after a hesitation and  against her better judgement, went to grab the bucket of homicidal bolts.

The ground started rumbling before she even got close. 0-0-0 teetered to a halt and started to backtrack, but was quickly felled by the vibrations. Aphra herself was shaken to her knees, and then her jaw slackened as she watched the coral tree rise higher and higher and then begin turning.

It wasn’t a weird coral tree, she realized. It wasn’t a tree at all.

“You make a lot of noise,” rumbled a voice like a rockslide. It was coming from a face as tall as L3, glowing pale grey eyes piercing out from the darkness of the creature’s head plate. When they stopped rising their head was several stories high. Aphra noted with trepidation that all of the treasure-hunting party were well within the creature’s enormous reach.

“Uh, sorry?” Aphra tried. “We didn’t know anyone was here.”

“Perhaps not,” the creature said. “But I sense your greed. You have come to ransack the offerings, have you not?”

Kriff. A Force-user, or just good at putting two and two together? Either way, at least now they knew why this was a pilgrimage site.

“It’s a tough galaxy,” Lando interjected, voice smooth and placating. “Everyone needs credits. But we didn’t come looking for a fight.”

Really, really hoping that they hadn’t found one anyway, Aphra cleared her throat. “You’re the great wisdom that pilgrims came to seek, aren’t you?”

That unsettling gaze turned to fall square on her and, oh, sithspit, she swore she could feel it sifting through her none-too-presentable soul.

“Yes,” the talking mountain replied. “I am the Bendu. But there haven’t been any pilgrims for some time now. I’d gotten used to the peace and quiet.”

“We really are sorry to bother you,” Aphra said, and she was sincere, if only because irritating giant Force-using hermits was always a Bad Idea. “We’d be happy to leave you in peace, it’s just that,” and she had an urge to tell a sob story, a sick mother or a child who needed school fees or something like that, the kind of heartstring-tugging tale she had a dozen of ready to go when she needed to talk her way out of something. But she stomped on the feeling as hard as she could, because if there was one thing she’d learned about the Force, it was not to lie to its users. “Just that, well, he’s right, it’s a tough galaxy.” She paused, squinted up into the spooky eyes. Tried a smile. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to part with some of the offerings? Maybe trade?”

The Bendu frowned.

Was Aphra just feeling intimidated, or was the sky actually getting darker?

* * *

0-0-0 was slow, but Dek negotiated his droid-toting services very quickly, so Aphra only lost a few seconds of escape time. That was very important when the lightning started.

* * *

Plus side, Aphra got to see Lando with his hair electrified into wild disarray.

* * *

Back on Lothal, Aphra sat in a different shitty cantina and stared dejectedly at her drink. Another job gone off the rails. At this rate she’d have to do something drastic, like find a dig somewhere and do field work like some kind of grad student.

Knocking the firewater back, she winced a little at the burn in her throat. She wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t been cut with starfighter fuel.

“That job could have gone worse, you know,” L3 said as she settled onto a stool next to Aphra’s. “All of us came back in one piece.”

Aphra grunted. “Kind of a low bar.”

L3 laughed. “Can rogue archaeologists afford higher ones than smugglers? Because from what I’ve seen, you’re flying by the seat of your pants just as much as the rest of us.”

Aphra shrugged. Flagged the bartender for another shot. “I’ve always been more ambitious than realistic.”

L3 laughed again, Aphra wasn’t sure why. The bartender came back with the bottle.

L3 covered Aphra’s glass with her fingers. Aphra finally turned to face the droid.

“Do you want to keep drinking away your disappointment?” L3 said, leaning close. To Aphra’s astonishment and delight, her free hand landed on Aphra’s knee. “Or do you want to make good on all those looks you’ve been giving me?”

Aphra’s mouth was suddenly very dry.

“The second one,” she half-whispered. Licked her lips and found her voice. “Definitely the second one.”

She threw a credit chit on the bar, ignoring the exasperated bartender, and grabbed L3’s hand to pull her outside, as if she could actually drag her anywhere. L3 went anyway, chuckling.

“My ship?” Aphra asked, half-breathless.

L3 nodded.

Aphra didn’t really remember the journey back to her ship, only vaguely registered telling BT and 0-0-0 not to knock on her door unless the ship was on fire or boarded by Lord Vader, and therefore was a bit disoriented when she found herself alone in her quarters with L3.

Standing with barely a hand’s breadth between them, Aphra reached up and traced her fingertips across L3’s dome, just above the sensor light.

Droids with sexualities, Aphra knew, had a few different ways of approaching the act itself. Some of them had special processors that ran off sensor input, some used programs to interpret physical stimulation as pleasurable, and some didn’t use any mods at all, just enjoyed the power to turn organics into quivering messes through touch.

“You a software or a processor kind of girl?” Aphra asked, guessing that L3, with all her self-modification, probably didn’t just settle for vicarious pleasure.

L3 loomed closer, one hand on Aphra’s waist, the opposite thumb tracing up her throat. Aphra heard the muffled sound of a revving motor. “Both.”

“Oh kriff,” Aphra whispered, heat rushing into her face and chest and between her legs. She tugged L3 backwards, winding up against the bulkhead, one leg hitched up over L3’s hip pivot. Her hands fluttered on L3’s shoulder plating, kind of wanting to work her fingers into the cables at the back of L3’s neck but also wanting to keep her hand.

L3 was stroking Aphra’s collarbone and neck while her other hand opened Aphra’s fly. Then those delicate, hard fingertips were sliding into Aphra’s underwear, a little cold but that was kind of exciting, too, something so clearly different from all the organic women she’d bedded. She was half-wondering if her slickness would be corrosive to L3, but the droid knew her own chassis and wasn’t complaining, so Aphra decided not to care, either, just throw her head back and moan in her throat when L3’s thumb found her clit.

“Oh kriff do more of that,” Aphra whispered, leg hitching up higher.

L3 did. For approximately thirty seconds. Then she laughed darkly and withdrew her hand.

It took a moment for Aphra to pull together a better response than an aggrieved whine.

“Don’t stop, why’d you stop?”

L3’s sensor light bounced back and forth in what Aphra was completely sure was a smug manner. “Me first.”

Aphra pawed at L3’s arm, trying to encourage it back between her legs. “But you already got my pants open, come on.”

L3 laughed once. “You think I trust you not to just roll over once you’ve gotten what you’ve wanted? If you want to come, you’re going to have to earn it.” To add teasing to the frankly insulting ultimatum, L3 rested the pad of one carboplast finger on Aphra’s bottom lip, just enough to part them slightly.

That settled it. Not only was Aphra going to make sure the sex was good for both of them, she was going to kriff L3 so good that that superior bitch of a droid would miss Aphra once they’d parted ways.

Indignant shock melting into a glare, Aphra ducked her head forward to take more of L3’s finger into her mouth, lips closing just beneath the plating on the back of her hand, and started to suck.

L3 gave an electronic sigh and settled her weight against the wall behind Aphra, leaning their hips together. She hummed when Aphra pulled off of her finger, then offered another.

Aphra took them both back into her mouth, tongue sliding along the underside, cautiously probing the spaces between finger segments.

“The wires and conduits in my waist,” L3 said, sounding a little staticky. “I’ve added vibration and pressure sensors.”

Humming her understanding around L3’s fingers — and the sound moving through them made L3 tremble a little, ha, take _that_ — Aphra let her hands drift down the droid’s back and chest plating, fingers lacing into the thicket of cables.

L3 sighed luxuriantly at that and started moving her torso in tiny figure eights, generating more friction and tension in her components. Smirking, Aphra decided to try stroking along the wires, pulling them gently up and inwards, down and outwards, everything calculated to accentuate what the droid had started. L3 moaned and started cursing in Binary.

Aphra pulled her mouth off L3’s fingers and leaned close to her auditory sensor.

“How do you like it?” she murmured. “Hard and fast? Slow build? Lots of teasing, or straight to business?” She gave a slight twist of one hand, and L3, gratifyingly, shook in her grasp.

«You like mysteries,» she said, still in Binary. «Figure it out.»

Begging, Aphra decided. The best way to make sure you were doing what your partner wanted was to make them ask for it, right?

She kept at L3’s wires for several minutes, then carefully extricated one hand and trailed it up to L3’s neck. “Got sensors in these too?”

L3 didn’t speak for a moment, still twisting her waist in Aphra’s grasp, and that was a somewhat satisfying reversal of how this whole thing got started.

«Yes,» she said at last. Her head tilted forward, close to resting against Aphra’s forehead, leaving plenty of room in the back for Aphra to insert her hand.

Aphra started by just cupping her palm against the cables. A perverse part of her wondered what would happen if she yanked a wire out. If L3 had redundancies. If she would feel pain. If she’d be incapacitated. If it would only make her angry enough to kill Aphra — because really, even the threat of BT and 0-0-0 wasn’t huge for a droid as smart and fast and strong as L3 (and that would be if Aphra’s droids even cared enough about her demise to enact retribution). If L3 did try to kill her, how she’d do it, if she’d crush Aphra’s windpipe or smash her skull or electrocute her to death. Mostly, Aphra wanted to get off and kriff the smug superiority out of L3, but there was that dark impulse in her, too, the same one that always was. The part of her that couldn’t see a ledge without wanting to jump off just to learn the feel of weightlessness.

It was a balance, a dangerous one, like the time she’d kriffed Jorna Moon in the cockpit of her ship when they were both high, unsure if they’d wind up injuring one another, flying the ship into a star, or having the best sex of their lives. She felt a little high now, come to think of it, senses flooded and slow and her brain hovering a meter or so over her body. The body that was practically electrified, feeling every twitch in L3’s chassis, the machine warmth of her, the  vibrations of her servos vivid against Aphra’s skin.

Even out of her head, Aphra still knew she wanted to keep it — and, kriff, okay, the galaxy would be dimmer without L3 — so all her dark thoughts stayed locked in her head. Instead she stroked her hand up and down L3’s neck wires, let her nails drag up the ridges in one of the conduits. L3 shuddered and clutched at Aphra’s sides for support, sensor light flickering, and made a noise that was half static and half moan.

_Full sabacc._

Grinning wickedly, Aphra worked around the wires in L3’s neck until her hand was wrapped entirely around a conduit.

L3 moaned again, louder this time. Aphra dragged her fingers up the conduit, letting them bump over the ribbing slow enough that she could feel each ridge one individually, and L3’s fingers curled deeper into Aphra’s hips, almost enough to hurt. Aphra kept at that for a while, throwing in a few quick strokes every now and again for variety, and then her other hand found a conduit in L3’s waist and started doing the same thing.

Some garbled sound came out of L3’s vocabulator, and then Aphra stopped moving both hands.

After a moment, L3 pulled back enough to give Aphra was felt very much like a glare.

Aphra grinned back. “Something the matter?”

«If you don’t resume what you were doing, I’ll tell everyone I meet what a terrible lay you are,» L3 threatened.

“You only had to ask,” Aphra said cheerfully, and then went right back to tugging on both conduits, and then, for good measure, she tilted her head to the side opposite her hand and closed her mouth around one of L3’s neck wires, letting her teeth sink, just a little, into the flexible coating.

L3 keened, and then her sensor light brightened intensely, more than Aphra thought was possible, all while her chassis shuddered against Aphra with the simultaneous activation of most of her servos. Then she went dark and quiet, softening in Aphra’s arms.

“If that wasn’t the best kriff you’ve had in the last month, you can leave right now,” Aphra said, even though she was aching for L3’s fingers. Damn her stubborn pride.

«You’re a liar,» L3 said languidly, «but that was so good I think it even makes up for having to listen to you.»

“Kriff yeah. Mission accomplished,” Aphra said, and started squirming. She was trying to get her leg back up on L3’s hip, it having slid down to the deck some time ago.

L3 had other ideas. Her fingers curled into Aphra’s waistband and pulled her pants and underwear both down her thighs. She didn’t bother with Aphra’s boots, seemingly content to leave Aphra standing there hobbled, and the really embarrassing thing was that Aphra found that incredibly hot.

L3 leaned close, one hand tangling in Aphra’s hair, keeping her from hitting her head on the wall when she arched her spine back at L3 pushing two fingers into her cunt. She was even wetter than when L3 had first touched her, able to take the wedge-shaped first knuckles with no problem, just the pleasant ache of being stretched and the delicious, strange sensation of getting kriffed with something hard and articulated.

Aphra canted her hips to try to encourage L3’s fingers to the right spot, but the droid’s looming hugeness pinned her to the wall even more effectively than the hand on her hip.

“Kriff kriff kriff kriff kriff,” Aphra panted. “C’mon, please, just a little deeper, you’re almost there, stars,” and she didn’t care that she was begging, not even a little, not if it got her what she wanted.

L3 laughed, and then her thumb began stroking Aphra’s clit for the second time. Aphra gave a strangled moan, doing her best to grind against the carboplast, and was, again, frustrated.

“‘M gonna go around telling people _you’re_ a terrible lay,” she grumbled.

L3’s whole chassis shook as she laughed. “I’m a droid. You can’t tear down respect I don’t have.”

“Then I’ll make them respect you just so I can break it,” Aphra said, somewhat nonsensically, straining to get more pressure, more friction. “Just kriff me!”

Laughing again, L3 twisted her wrist, pushed into Aphra up to her palm, and activated vibrators in the tip of every finger. She pulsed round after round of vibrations into Aphra, the buzz permeating her sweet spot and entrance and clit and what felt like every damn part of her existence, let alone her body, and Aphra came hard enough to see hyperspace.

When she could perceive things that were not her own body or things touching it, Aphra found herself alone and with her pants still around her knees. L3 had at least been considerate enough to put her in bed, though. And while her absence was a bit disappointing — Aphra could have gone for another round or four — they both had things to do.

Later, once she mustered the energy to check, she found a new contact link in her holonet message box.

“Ha,” she said to herself, triumphant. “‘Bad lay’ my cute little ass.”

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: A droid talking longingly (though not in any detail) about torturing people, huge-ass spiders
> 
> Come talk robot lesbians with me on Tumblr at [bright-elen](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bright-elen).


End file.
